Page 25 of Lady Macbeth

Naturally, she has considered what she will say. But the words turn to ash on her tongue. The men’s swords are sheathed at their sides and, unlike the weapons of her husband’s men, they are hilted in gold. Roscille tries to see them for what they are: servants, and displeasing ones at that. Their blades are irrelevant to her aims. They will not raise them in a lady’s presence.

Instead of speaking, she reaches up and carefully folds back her veil. The men startle, choking on their protests. Before they can raise their voices, she meets the gaze of one, then the other, and says, “Quiet.”

Their mouths snap shut. Their eyes fix on her, unblinking. The change has come over them so suddenly, the metamorphosis almost invisible, no panicked writhing like a nymph turned to a tree or a mortal into a flower or fish. Roscille’s throat tightens.

This is power. With a single word, a single look, she has arranged the world to her liking. This is how kings must feel, every moment of the day, how her father must feel as all of Breizh bends and warps to his will.

The men are still silent and staring at her. They rock slightly back and forth but their gazes never falter. Roscille inhales.

“Open the door,” she says. “Let me into the chamber.”

Their bodies move as naturally as breathing.

The king sleeps on his back, hands clasped across his chest. His wheezing snores fill the room.

Roscille approaches the bed. Duncane does not stir. She is able to take in his features as she could not before, from a distance: his bushy brows, threaded with silver. The deep lines that bracket his mouth, suggesting that once upon a time he smiled often and easily. Despite his age, his hair is thick and full, and in places Roscille can still see patches of its original color—copper, like Evander’s. His chest rises and falls gently with his breaths.

This is a man with a beating heart and pulsing lungs and hot-running blood and Roscille cannot do it. She claps a hand over her mouth so the king will not wake to her choked-out whimper. When Macbeth told her how he killed the Thane of Cawder, he made it sound like the simplest, headiest of pleasures. How can it be so?

She has the dagger in the bodice of her gown—Macbeth’s dagger, the one he wielded against Cawder. Anointed, she supposes, with the prophecy of les Lavandières. But as she begins to draw it out, something occurs to her, something that passed beneath her husband’s attention. He was certain he could keep her from the Druide as he performed cruentation, but what if he cannot? And what if—Roscille does not know the shape of her power, how long it will stretch, whether she can plant a thought in these chamberlains’ minds that will not wither away when she is gone from their sight. What if, when she vanishes down the hall and they blink to themselves, as if woken from slumber, they remember the Lady who slipped into the chamber and slipped out with blood coating her hands?

Panic crests like a wave, then dissolves into sickly foam that turns her stomach. At least the king does not stir. Even in sleep he wears those thick, jeweled rings. Very slowly, Roscille turns around and faces the two chamberlains.

Their stares have not averted; they have not even blinked. All the rough amusement, the jesting in their eyes, the wine-flush on their cheeks—gone. Her belly is slippery with nausea. Will power always feel so precarious? Will it ever be so natural that when it is taken from her, it will be like someone has slashed open her throat?

“Come,” she says hoarsely. “Draw your swords, and—”

The men move like bronze statues roused to life, excited only by her will. They come to the king’s bedside and unsheathe their blades, and the whisper of metal against hide makes Duncane twitch at last, eyelids fluttering. The only light is from the hearth, a steady but distant orange glow, and he is half blind even in the best of circumstances, so now he cannot see; he can only hear the presence of others, and—

Fearfully, he spasms, crying out, “Lisander! Lisander!”

Roscille’s heart briefly stops. Here is a man withered, ancient, sick, hardly lucid, still half dreaming, and yet he keens for his son like a mother over her infant’s cold crib. In that moment she thinks she would rather slash open her own throat than harm him. But his cries grow louder, and someone will come soon, so she presses her hand across his mouth (across the same lips that kissed Lisander’s fingers) until his words are garbled, and only his rheumy eyes dart with blind, animal terror.

“Kill him,” Roscille chokes out. “Please, make it quick, please—”

She sounds like a child herself. And then—she will never know if it was true or not, her fear. Because that is when her mind unlatches from her body, as if someone has taken a trephine to her skull, cracked it, and released the black mist of bad spirits. She watches, outside herself, as two blades vanish inside the king’s slack belly. The hilts twist and twist. Duncane coughs, blood running down his chin. But they have stolen the breath from him, and thus stolen his screams.

The blades reveal themselves, gleaming and slickly red. The wounds they have made are mostly hidden beneath the sheets and the king’s sleeping tunic, but the blood pours forth anyway, sluicing through the fabric, splattering the floor. Every second stretches to the length of a lifetime. Roscille, still outside her body, hears herself gasp.

The chamberlains’ arms fall to their sides. Their blade-points drip. How long until her power is used up, wrung out? This is the thought that presses her mind back; she inhabits her body again like a spectral possession. She cannot keep the men under her charm forever. Their eyes will clear. Their limbs will move again of their own accord. And then their mouths will open, their lips will move, and they will say, It was the witch-woman, that foreign bride, that Lady Macbeth.

Roscille meets the eyes of each one. It is easier, this time. They are already inhuman, no more than expedients to her, swords without arms attached, tools, draughts tiles. It is not pleasure, exactly, but it is still something that fills her up. She is satiated, gorged, even, though the food she has consumed has no particular taste.

“You will take your swords,” she says, and now her voice does not shake, “and put them to each other’s hearts. You will need to press harder than you think.”

The blood on their swords has not even had time to dry. It is still gleaming, ruby-hued, holding the firelight. And this time, there are no blankets to stop Roscille from seeing: The blades are driven forward, slicing through the sinew and gristle of their chests, shearing bone. Two mirrored wounds. The blood sprays as the swords are wrenched out again. It splatters Roscille’s face, the front of her dress, hot as licks of flame.

Roscille has already stolen their humanity, so the men do not cry out as they die. Their bodies topple wordlessly, like felled trees. Their eyes do not even close. They crumple where they stood, limbs folding at odd and gruesome angles, cheeks against the cold stone.

The blood pools. It laps at the hem of her gown. Her slippers soak quickly, sticking her to the floor. It is what every man says, when he first kills another: I did not know there would be so much. Roscille hates herself for thinking this dull, common thought.

There is a bucket of water in her room, which she uses to clean her hands and face. The dress cannot be saved. She strips it off as the blood dries on the linen, turning it stiff, the color of rust. She lights a fire in the hearth and tosses the dress inside. Sparks erupt.

This part, at least, is passionless, function only. Roscille kneels naked on the bear-rug and scrubs her skin until it is stinging and raw. The ends of her hair, beneath her fingernails. The blood clings in clever, curious places: behind her ear. In the cleft of her chin. She scrubs until the veins show blue through her skin, standing out as clear as cracks in ice.

Near the end, she catches her reflection in the murky water. Once she would have seen a girl, beautiful, yes, but a bit strange, especially in the eyes. Once she would have opened her mouth to see if she had suddenly grown an ermine’s sharp teeth. She had so badly craved that little power, whatever would make her more than a limp body inside a bridal gown.

Now she sees her cheeks, reddened at last, by the blood of King Duncane. Has she been transformed? Or merely revealed? All she knows is that she is not Roscille of Breizh, not Rosele, Rosalie, not even Roscilla. She is now only Lady Macbeth.